Polar Dates August 7, 2008 – August 25, 2008
Reflections on Toolik Lake
It’s been a busy time since my return to Michigan and a time of many adjustments. The less obvious interior adjustments such as thought, feeling and reflection of the experience itself linger and surpass the obvious adjustments such as creature comforts, sundown, and differences in climate and surroundings.
The evening before I left Toolik, I stayed up all night to witness that which is completely foreign to the vast majority of the human population – a sunset and sunrise that are so near to one another that the sky is never completely dark. Keep in mind that when I arrived at Toolik Lake on June 27, there was no sunset, no sunrise, no dusk, no dawn.
After a month, the sun began to set, although there was still...
Polar Date: July 23 & 24, 2008
The past couple of days have been busy, as I have been working on tying up loose ends. The weather broke and we have had more sunshine and warmer temps than earlier in the week. Because so many people were unable to get all their data collected during the snowy, rainy and cold weather, camp has been really bustling.
Today I hiked up the boardwalks for the last time.
Cry
I took a picture of this beautifully constructed boardwalk last week when the weather was foggy and rainy. This picture is better because it looks like you could just walk down the boardwalk until you got to the mountains. Of course, you can't.
I wanted to take pictures of areas that I had previously photographed in the less than ideal conditions. Those pictures are in the...
Polar Date: July 22, 2008
SNOW!!! The rain turned to snow overnight and researchers, grads, undergrads, teachers, staff, in fact, everyone was energized and excited to wake up to a winter wonderland in July.
July 22, 2008 brought snow to Toolik. When I stepped out of the tent I was greeted with a scene from a typical Michigan winter morning. The WeatherPort is dry but not warm. My roommate Rebecca and I have not obtained a portable tent heater yet, I think we'll be getting one for tonight!
Ironically, Christmas in July will be celebrated on Friday, so the snow put everyone into the Christmas spirit. Everyone, that is except for the terrestrial people who had to put their plant counting on hold. The aquatic people were excited to get into the boats and take change-of-weather-...
Polar Date: July 20 & 21, 2008
The weather did not give us a break for long. Sunday and Monday were both gray, rainy, foggy and cold. I spent Sunday working on my lessons and activities that I will be having my students do in the fall. A major part of PolarTrec is for the PolarTrec teachers to take their field experiences and translate them into meaningful labs and experiments. It’s a challenge because the researchers here use very high-tech and expensive equipment that is not available to classrooms or schools. Additionally, the science is extremely complex, and it’s necessary to make the activities understandable while still providing an opportunity for them to have valid results.
Since this is my last week at Toolik, I want to begin writing more specifically about...
Polar Date: July 19, 2008
Blue skies returned! People were overjoyed especially those who had been working indoors for 4 solid days. I was the opposite though, since I had been in the field for the cold rainy weather and today was an indoor lab day.
After almost a solid week of fog, clouds and overcast,rainy skies, Toolik woke up to bright sunshine and blue skies again.
The soils in Lab 4 were ready to be processed yet again. This time we were taking the small samples Karl weighed, adding 45 ml of reverse osmosis (RO) water, blending them in the kind of blender normally used for making smoothies , then pipetting 1 ml of the soil slurry into 10ml test tubes that had already been preloaded with 9 ml of RO water. The test tube was shaken and from that 2 slides were made.
After I...
Polar Date: July 18, 2008
The fog stuck around and it was even colder last night than it was the night before. I slept in 4 layers and was wearing gloves and a hat. I hope it doesn’t get any colder, if it does I will have so many clothes on I won’t be able to fit into my sleeping bag.
Frown
Today Laura wanted to go to the second oldest plots to get data and those plots are located north of Pump Station 3 on the Haul Road (Dalton Hwy). Carol, Laura, Donna, Mary and I packed lunches, grabbed rubber boots and every warm piece of clothing we owned and took off out of camp,
Our destination looked less like a science research area and more like a gravel pit. And it turned out that it was a gravel pit.
Dalton Highway is both gravel and paved. The highway department has very large...
Polar Date: July 17, 2008
The fog rolled in bringing with it cold air, wind and more rain. It would have been a great day for sleeping in, but that was not part of the plan. Today was Live from IPY which started at 9:00 a.m.
Smile
Donie, John, Laura and I gathered around the phone and computer in Lab 2 around 8:45 and waited to get started. We had a bit of technical difficulty, but Janet and Kristin from ARCUS in Fairbanks made everything run smoothly. It was so good to hear friends, family, co-workers and other Polar-Trec teachers! It was also fun to tell everyone about all the important work we are doing here at Toolik.
At around 10:00, Laura, Carol, Donna and I began the work for the rest of the day, which entailed going out to the historic study plots in the morning, then...
Polar Date: July 16, 2008
The weather, the weather, the weather. It was a gray and dark morning, with the sun blocked by an impenetrable overcast. The Brooks Range was completely blocked from view and the helicopter did not wake people up this morning. I got up early enough though to start the day with some scrambled eggs and sausage, and then it was off to the lab. Donie was back from Fairbanks and it was a busy morning getting the final slides set up and into ARCUS for the Live from IPY event.
John Moore with his graduate student Karl took Mary, a teacher from Ft. Collins, Colorado out to the tussock plots to get some soil cores. Laura Gough, with her graduate student Carol and undergraduate student Donna, went along to help out.
These cores were removed from fertilized and...
Polar Date: July 15, 2008
It’s starting to feel like a scene from Groundhog Day with every morning beginning exactly the same – alarm goes off three times, first one at 7:15, second at 7:30, 3rd at 7:45, then Rebecca my roommate gets up. She is out of the tent in 5 minutes flat. I reluctantly get up, struggle to get my contact lens in without benefit of a mirror, and then finish getting ready. It takes me about 10 minutes to get out of the tent. After that, though, anything can happen!
This day was a day of new faces. The other researchers and their team had arrived the night before. After breakfast, I strolled over to Lab 2 to meet everyone. It felt like I was meeting the new neighbors, with that feeling that you hope everyone is nice and will get along. And it turned out well...
Polar Date: July 13, 2008
Sunday morning – a day off! I awoke to blazing sunshine, which was a welcome change from the heavily overcast and rainy weather we had been having for the past week or so. When I looked at my watch, I saw it was 11:00 a.m. I had slept for 12 hours! It felt good to be so well rested and it was a fitting way to start the day, almost halfway through the day. I decided to mimic my Sundays at home with the exception of not being able to attend Mass or spend the day with my family.
A normal Sunday at home in Michigan involves going out to Church, then breakfast, then reading the paper for a few hours, taking my dog Pi for a walk, sometimes going to the park or going canoeing, cooking a nice dinner then doing a little bit of computer work.
Miniature...
Polar Date: July 12, 2008
The plan for today was project work all around. With Donie gone, everyone was working feverishly on his or her own projects, myself included. I spent most of the day in the Lab, continuing work on Live from IPY, journal, picture uploads and management and educational resources for school in the fall.
Due to the fact that the day was spent with my face staring at the laptop screen, there’s only a single picture to share for the day. The picture is of a flyer that was taped to the inside of one of the bathroom doors. It reflects the humor and creativity of the people working here!
You can never be sure what will be posted on the inside of the bathroom doors. This one appeared in the last few days - I'm not sure if it's for real or not.
Meal update: I...
Polar Date: July 11, 2008
More rain and chilly temperatures grounded a lot of activities, including the helicopter. Because the helicopter did not wake us up at 8:00 a.m. half the camp overslept causing many people to appear in the dining hall in pj’s. That’s unusual because the routine is to get up, get dressed, and go eat. Breakfast is served from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. At 8:30 the hot breakfast goodies are stashed away, with toast and cold cereal the only remaining options. Of course juice and coffee are always available, along with cold beverages such as Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew, etc.
The cooler sits right inside the dining hall door. It contains a variety of cold beverages including V8, V8 Splash, apple juice, Coke, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, Sprite, Mug Root Beer and...
Polar Date: July 10, 2008
After a night of rain, the day continued the trend with rain all day. When it rains here it really rains hard for a while, then lets up to a drizzle then rains hard again, reminding me of someone trying to adjust the showerhead to have the right amount of pressure.
I had planned to go on the boardwalks with Laura Reynolds to visit her experiments, but I ended up working inside all day on a photo montage of all the ways people and goods move through camp, using the pictures I had taken of every wheeled device I could find.
Used primarily by the maintenance crew to quickly get from one end of camp to the other.
There may be more than one of these, if not, this one gets around a lot. Used mostly by staff to travel from one area to another quickly.
Used by...
Polar Date: July 9, 2008
When will the sun go down? It’s no secret that Alaska is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun. It should be known as the Land of All Sun All the Time. Last night I awoke at 2:00 a.m. from a sound sleep and was so disoriented by the bright sunshine in the tent I thought it was 2 in the afternoon. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t anyone around anywhere and it wasn’t until I looked at the 24 -hour clock on my computer that I realized it was actually 2 o’clock in the morning.
That experience led me to wonder when will there be a sunset up here? I did what everybody does when they wonder something and there is a computer at hand – I Googled it, or as I like to say, I put it in the google. The site I liked best shows the sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk...
Soil cores are processed in order to determine the amount of nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus available to plants. The samples in this video were obtained on July 6, 2008 from a June, 2004 tundra-burn site. The soil extractor works with vacuum pressure to remove soil and salt particulates, leaving behind the clear solution for testing.
Polar Date July 8, 2008
Soil Extraction Day Has Arrived! Yes, this day will be etched in my Toolik experience memory. It was the final step for the soil that had been taken from the burn site on Saturday, July 5.
This is the staging area for the soil extractions. The soil has been in solution since the coring homogenization on Sunday, July 6th. Note that all the labware is plastic. Although some is rinsed out, much is discarded. Any water with soap or chemicals cannot go down the drain, it is saved into a cistern that is pumped out and taken to Fairbanks by tanker truck. That makes the cost of cleaning the labware very expensive. Autoclaving is an option, but the energy required to autoclave is also expensive since the electricity for the entire camp is provided by diesel...
Polar Date July 7, 2008
Lab 2 team had a day off since we had worked on Sunday. Everyone did their own thing, some went on a long, long hike into the Brooks Range, some did laundry, some got caught up with personal correspondence, some napped and lazed around and I got caught up on picture work and journals for PolarTrec.
The rest of the field station was working as usual, collecting samples, surveying plots, going out in boats, analyzing data, going to remote sites via helicopter, etc. It’s odd that there can be over 100 people staying at camp, yet during the day, it looks like a ghost town, everyone is so busy with science. It’s like a gigantic science fair is coming up, and in a way, it is.
The majority of the research being done here is funded through National Science...
Polar Date July 6, 2008
Another beautiful day arrived – I can’t say "dawned” because the sun never sets. It was, however shining intensely and the tent was hot. The plan for the day was to gather at the lab at 9:00 a.m. to begin processing the soil cores we had collected at the burn site. This would prove to be a fairly large task requiring extra hands, extra patience and extraordinary attention to detail. Lab 2 areas were readied in advance of the undertaking.
The soil people (Elise and I) along with some much welcomed help from Yu Wei and Matt collected 10 soil cores at each study plot, 1 every 10 meters. The lab area is readied for the big undertaking of processing the soil cores.
Protocol was reviewed carefully and we took our positions – Matt was going to do all the weighing...
Polar Date July 5, 2008
What a day! This journal is just going to have to speak through pictures. I’ll preface it by saying that I rode in the helicopter twice to the 2004 remote burn site and this is a day I will never forget. I have video footage I’m working on to upload, so for now, I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves. If you get a chance, visit the photo gallery to see more – there are no words to express beyond the captions and pictures what this day was like.
This is the helicopter used by the Field Station research teams to travel to remote sites that cannot be reached by truck, boat or foot. Later in the summer, a second helicopter will be available because even now, there are so many researchers doing work in remote areas of the tundra.
Some of the research...
Polar Date July 4,2008
How does a remote science field camp celebrate a major holiday? In the same fashion as most cities, towns and villages, with special food, a parade and some fireworks. The fireworks were just sound and a little smoke, since no one would see them in the sunny sky anyway. The food was delicious, filet mignon and/or lobster tail, duchess potatoes, Caesar salad, steamed mixed vegetables, rolls and butter and strawberry shortcake for dessert.
After dinner (7 p.m.) lab teams scrambled to begin the work to create a float or marching unit complete with costumes for the parade that would begin at 9:00. Each lab marches or rides their float around the lab area, then performs for the kitchen crew judges at the dining hall. The lab where I work (Lab 2) chose a theme...
Polar Date July 4, 2008
Independence Day at Toolik Lake began as a normal workday with people up and in the labs or fields or lakes on schedule, which means, early. The weather stayed bright and sunny all day and night with fluffy white clouds providing contrast for the bright blue of the sky. Donie wanted to take me out to the "towers” by Imnaviat creek to have a look at the equipment used by Dr. Laura Gough for measuring air, snow and solar radiation.
Much research has been done on this watershed, including snow pack, dissolved carbon and thaw depth.
Dr. Gough will be arriving at Toolik on July 14th with Carol her grad student and Donna her undergrad student. Dr. John Moore will be arriving on July 21st with another teacher. I can’t wait to meet and work with all of them!
The...
Polar Date July 3, 2008
Hurray – the weather cleared up. Toolik Lake was bathed in abundant sunshine after a few days of complete overcast. It’s silly to expect the weather to be beautiful everyday, silly and unrealistic, certainly when the station is above the Arctic Circle. But summer is summer and so the expectation, although unrealistic is present nonetheless.
Looking toward the Brooks Range on a bright and breezy day. The tundra blooms with a diversity of life, including the white crowned sparrows that recently fledged and flit amoung the betula.
I got a late start today – I overslept. Normally when my roommate’s alarm clock goes off the first time, I wake up and lay there and wait for the second alarm to go off, then I practice opening my eyes and by the third alarm I’m...
Polar Date July 2, 2008
Today the weather was not with us. The skies were completely overcast and reached down to the mountaintops and into the passes. Due to those bad conditions, the helicopter field trip was postponed until Saturday. We found that out after we got up really, really early, ate a quick breakfast (sausage, eggs, fruit and coffee) and gathered at Lab2. The helicopter pilot had to make the call, and certainly it’s better to postpone when she tells you that she can’t see the mountains while flying.
Staying back was actually a blessing in disguise. We had plenty of time to review protocol for the trip and review equipment and materials necessary and we took a jaunt up the boardwalks to do some work on tussocks.
Elise is actually laying down on the tundra, not...
Polar Date July 1, 2008
Back on the boardwalks counting flowers. In this case we were counting Carex bigelowii. This time Elise was counting the west-side of the plots and Matt was counting the east-side of the plots, I was writing down data again.
Carex bigelowii is seen toward the center. The flowers are the dark purple structures.
Counting went along quickly and we were back in time for lunch.
We had an evening meeting to finalize plans for the field trip to the 2004 burn site. We discussed the transporting of equipment and logistics of getting everyone there and back.
Everything must be carefully planned for an expedition such as this. The smallest thing forgotten can create the biggest problems if the team gets to the field and has forgotten an item of equipment or sampling...
Polar Date June 30, 2008
I’m getting into a more regular schedule now, waking up pretty late (7:50 or so), getting dressed and ready for the day and barely making the cut-off for breakfast at 8:30. Actually the only cut-off is for the hot food line. That line has breakfast meat and pseudo-meat (like tofu sausage), pancakes or waffles, hot cereal and different styles of eggs. There is always fruit, cold cereal, assorted breads and muffins available so unless you want to eat hot food, you can eat breakfast-type food anytime. Work begins in this lab around 9:00, although people going out in the field usually arrive earlier to get ready for the field.
I planned to work in the office in the morning to get caught up on computer work and to observe work around the lab and then go out...
